The present invention relates to a system for preventing the illegal use of digital contents, or more in particular to a technique effectively applicable to such a system by prohibiting the use of digital contents which may be illegally copied, removed or downloaded in the various types of shopping centers or retail outlets engaged in processing the digital contents.
With the recent progress of electronic commercial transactions on the internet, the on-line sales of digital contents have begun to spread, and demand is growing for an infrastructure for conducting commercial transactions in what is called the four flows (sales promotion, spread of trade, flow of money and flow of commodities) with digital information. Especially for the distribution of digital contents, an infrastructure is required to establish a method of preventing the illegal use and protect the copyright of digital contents.
The techniques for distributing information safely on a network include those for preventing information leakage, preventing the alteration and evidencing the origin. A secure socket such as SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is known in which the contents on the communication route are encrypted between two points for preventing leakage, and a secure container is also known in which contents are encrypted and electronically signed.
The conventional techniques described above are intended to secure the safety of the distribution between two points by encrypting the information when it is distributed in the network. Accordingly, the applications of these techniques for protecting the digital contents in the recorded state and for preventing the illegal use within the various types of shopping centers or retail outlets are difficult, or the load of the encryption process for the large size digital contents is large.
In order to prevent the illegal use of digital contents after sales, it is necessary to generate personal digital contents permitting the use only by specific customers. Consider the application of the conventional technique to the case where digital contents are sold to a customer at a retail outlet after being distributed thereto from a storage management center. The storage management center where the purchasing customer is not specified cannot generate any personal digital contents, so that the different encryption processes are required for the distribution from the storage management center to the retail outlet and the sales from the retail outlet to the customer. Thereby, the load of the encryption process is larger.
An object of the present invention is to solve the above-mentioned problems and to provide a technique capable of preventing the illegal use of digital contents within the various types of shopping centers and retail outlets.
According to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided a system for preventing an illegal use of digital contents, wherein a replay processing of digital contents is controlled in accordance with a value of status information set in the digital contents. Thereby, it is possible to prevent the illegal use of digital contents.
In another aspect of the present invention, digital contents are generated by digitizing an original of contents, status information for prohibiting a replay process of all the generated digital contents is set in the generated digital contents to generate a invalidated version of digital contents, and the invalidated version of digital contents are stored.
In obtaining the approval of a contents holder owning the original of the contents to the contents of the generated digital contents, the status information of the invalidated version of digital contents is set to a value for permitting the replay processing by the contents holder to generate digital contents for approval and to transmit it to an approval unit of the contents holder.
The approval unit of the contents holder checks whether the status information set in the digital contents for approval indicates the value for permitting the replay processing by the contents holder. In the case where it is the value for permitting the replay processing, the approval unit performs the replay processing.
The digital contents approved in the way described above are stored in a storage management unit in the form of the invalidated version of digital contents, and then are distributed to vending machines. The encryption processing may be used for distributing the invalidated version of digital contents from the storage management unit to the vending machines over a wide area.
When the digital contents distributed to the vending machines are sold to a customer, the status information of the invalidated version of digital contents is set to the value for permitting the replay processing by the customer. Thereby, personal digital contents are generated and are sold to the customer.
A replay unit of the customer checks whether the status information set in the personal digital contents assumes the value for permitting the replay processing by the particular customer. Only in the case where the value permits the replay processing, the replay unit performs the replay processing.
As described above, according to the present invention, the digital contents are stored in the form of the invalidated version. Further, when the invalidated version of digital contents is validated, they are validated only for the specific user. Therefore, one who is not permitted to use them cannot read and use their contents even if he or she succeeds in copying, removing or downloading them. Also, the replay processing of the digital contents is controlled in accordance with the value of the status information set in the digital contents. Therefore, the user permitted to replay can be easily changed by changing the value of the status information of the digital contents for the benefit of the contents holder or a customer.
According to the system for preventing the illegal use of digital contents according to the present invention, the replay processing of the digital contents is controlled in accordance with the value of the status information set in the digital contents. Therefore, the illegal use of the digital contents within the various types of shopping centers and retail outlets can be prevented.